Christopher Alexander’s main premise in his own introduction to his method of
pattern languages set forth in a separate volume, “The Timeless Way of
Building” (1), is that there is a natural, intuitive – one
might say “unconscious” – process at work in vernacular architectures around the
world.

In developing a structural understanding of this process, he hopes to make
possible a Remembering and Return (to the Timeless Way) for us in the “West,”
which means the industrial/ rational civilization stemming from Europe and now
threatening to become world dominant.

That this is a threat is easy to say and among the circle of the readership of
this publication it is a commonplace. Responses to this threat including
Alexander’s, generally organize themselves around this idea of “remembering and
return.” There exists a faith in some solid ground of human being that – if only
we could connect with and rest in- would function to guide us out of our
predicament and into a more sustainable future.

I also hold views along these lines. Yet I think too many times solutions are
posed with out enough consideration of questions which are fundamental to an
understanding of the process we are involved in. It is easy to imagine returning
to a slower – paced, more “grounded” or land based way of life, and this image
involves an emotional response which cannot be denied. I think this feeling is
valid as far as it goes.

We are
responding to an inner knowing of the higher potentials of human being.

Nostalgia, however, is
not a firm basis upon which to create strategies and tactics that will produce a
truly sustainable form of life in the next century.

What is
required are answers to fundamental questions about human being,

especially as they relate to history.

FromSatisfaction to Disenchantment

We imagine reshaping our lives around timeless principles. That such principles
exist is indisputable. But what is the basis of the timelessness? I believe this
question resolves itself into the nature of satisfaction for human beings. We
can be intuitively in touch with the timeless way because we know in our bodies
what works for us as humans. Alexander, et al propose a methodology for applying
body knowledge to vernacular architecture in The Timeless Way of Building.
I have employed this method and can report
that it works. But then how have we become disconnected from something so close
to us?

Some things (e.g. the human body and its physical needs) never change - or
change so slowly as to seem constant - but the point is, some things
do, and there lies the rub. Human being is a
process of evolution which we call History. It does no good merely to bemoan the
loss of past innocence, be it body centered vernacular architecture or any other
expression of the commons. Through the enchantments of the mind’s search for
dominance over a fearsome Nature, clawing its way out of unconsciousness, the
older certainties of the body in a physical and social architecture appropriate
to it have been fed into the maw of Leviathan. Now we need clear direction,
because whereas in the recent past human history has been guided and shaped by
huge forces (economy, politics, culture), developing, as it were, outside of
conscious control, in the present historical moment we are under an increasing
demand to exert some kind of control over these very forces.

“If
‘consciousness’ does not play a large part in the future of the human species,
then what kind of future can we expect it to be?”

Terence McKenna

History is a “dialectical” process; that is, it proceeds in two opposing
directions simultaneously.So on the one hand, the original pre-conscious
psychological unity which tribal people experienced continues to break down into
the sometimes cacophonous competition of individual self interests that we call
“civil society.” At the same time conscious awareness of the true
interdependence of all humans on the planet in the possibility – for the first
time really (Bosnia, Rwanda, northern Ireland, and S.C. Los Angeles
notwithstanding) and – of the emergence of a of a truly global identity for
humanity is becoming possible. On the basis of what?

“History is the long the march from animality to freedom,” said Mao Tse Tung.

So
the question for us comes down to this:

what
will be the form of freedom we
intend to create?

And thinking about structuring “Village” as a response to the challenge of
creating a sustainable future, we need to think about the nature of the freedom
that 10,000 years of History has brought us.

The
Threat of Civil Society

It has been noted that civil society, which is a society characterized by the
supremacy of individual rights and responsibilities laid out in laws, rests on,
and in fact only functions on the basis of a substrate of forms of society,
values, and institutions which were created in previous pages of history. These
are namely the family, the nation, and the church or cult. These are all
unconscious forms of identity which have allowed individuals to find rest and to
function in society. At the same time, the functioning of the global industrial
form of civil society acts to tear down in disrupt these very institutions upon
which the rests.

“If man
will cut the same branch that he is sitting on, he will also fall down.”

So here is our dilemma. We emerge with our freedom completed (ideally) after the
long march, only to discover that the very creation of history that gave us our
own freedom, civil society, threatens to annihilate us, like Chronos devouring
his children. Let me stress here that we are talking about freedom of the
individual identity, which is still abstract freedom. Our choices are still
limited by concrete inequalities of power which are with us from our primate
past. The biggest monkey still rules the group. But, whereas our monkey
forebears were content to put up with the situation, we are not. Freedom of
choice in imagination demands to manifest itself in the world that we choose to
create. Hence the call for the “New Village.”

It is suggested in A Pattern Language that the largest group which can
govern itself by direct discussion and agreement is somewhere around 500
individuals. Since the people who are going to be seeking to create the New
Villages have come out of modern society where the groups they participate in
are both much smaller ( the average person has a group of 5 – 20 close friends
or associates ) and much larger ( many people being raised in urban settings
where a thousand or more students in their school, and 50,000 – 100,000 people
in their town), participating in direct democracy is a still unfamiliar and yet
critical set of skills which must be learned by New Villagers. Education for
consensus decision –making will be crucial to their success.

The
New Social Glue

As society begins to feel the contradictions embodied in industrial global modes
of production tearing down the stable basis of human life, two dialectically
related processes will begin to be a parent. First, the state, which is the
concrete embodiment of the essence of civil society in law or public ethics,
will react to disintegration in more basic levels of society – the family, civil
and religious communities – by seeking regulatory control over more and more
details of everyday life. This cannot be stopped. It is in the very being of a
civil state. So there approaches the totally administered society. The exact point at which this movement
toward administrative control can be called Fascist may not be easy to identify,
but we can feel movement toward it now, and we will recognize it after it is
reached; there can be no doubt. In reaction to this, individuals are seeking to
escape administrative control, and it is those individuals who will come
together to form intentional communities of all forms.
This is the main pattern that will have to be addressed in developing
the New Village. As a response to the
historical forces at once creating and destroying individual freedom, the roles
of conscious intention and personal affinity through choice will loom large,
becoming the main social glue of the New Village, serving where blood kinship
functioned in all previous forms of society.

Secondly, due to the already increased mobility of modern industrial society,
but also because it is a practical way to escape administrative control, an
increase in Nomadism will come to characterize the New Village. Here is a place
where conflict may be experienced by many people who, reacting to the insecurity
of modern society, are seeking a quieter, more “stable” form of life in an
intentional community. Each community will respond to this challenge in its own
way, but I would caution that this new Nomadism is not just a reaction to or a
bad product of the breakdown of industrial civil society, it is a feature of who
we are becoming. In the face of either the breakdown into chaos of the
industrial world or its stiffening under total administration, the New Villagers
will not escape into a sphere of nostalgia where we retreat into the woods,
close their eyes, and wait for the smoke to clear. The only hope for the truly
Angelic potential that we sense as our higher motive lies in globally
coordinated actions between groups in all bio regions. Just as affinity being
the main glue on a global level as well, it will behoove the New Villagers to
support Nomadism as the means to achieve global consensus between groups
separated by geography but united in the evolutionary purpose of common
survival.

If it is our destiny to survive the “ chaoastrophy” of the emergence of our
potential “Star Seed” being, the way is a forward escape through the
contradictions of painful and certainties which characterize late twentieth
century society. We must become a people at the same time lost and groping,
beset by dangerous freedom, and guided by knowledge that what we are is only now
being born. For above all the New Village is an incubator for the “Star Seed.”

If we
are to survive this final crisis it is incumbent on us to develop a

human
world that above all deserves to inherit this green planet.

And this brings me to my final point. Let it be understood that when we speak
of sustainable futures we’re talking about our own future. There is no need to
“save the late Earth.” Life on this planet has survived worse than the
crisis now present: asteroid strikes, ice ages, cosmic ray storms, reversal of
the polls, you name it. Were it not for the seed of freedom that we possess,
our extinction would be no special tragedy. And it is not a physical survival
that is the question, though it may be momentarily at issue. The point is that
the survival strategy we create must be worthy to survive. This can only be
judged in light of the historical mission that a quirk of evolution has placed
on us: to braid the oroboric serpent around, to complete the cycle of freedom
which finally states, “I am that I am.” and perhaps then to ……… be able to open
a little export office… and …….

1. Alexander,
C., The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, New York,
1979.

Paul Caron is a partner
in a company manufacturing and distributing foot bags, good medicine, his slogan
is “ Kick in the New Paradigm.” When not kicking sack and spinning philosophical
jive, he does custom cabinetry and furniture repair and sometimes designs novel
architecture for Earth Haven. He lives with an unruly tribe of cats at Rosey
Branch farm, and can be reached at 328 Stone Mountain Farm Road, Black Mountain,
North Carolina, 28711.

Paul has created Earth
Haven an "off the grid permaculture " community in North Carolina, he is the
father of the community and hangs out and builds all of the time. I have known
Paul since 1993 and done many things with him and traveled to Central America
while watching Earth Haven and his little solar house be built and, just living
life doing the best as one can!

Official web site
of the architect. Attempts to put his
theory into practice via the web, users can design buildings online using
Alexander's principles. " An Association of People from all walks of life. With
Architects and Builders we are rebuilding our neighborhoods, slowly rebuilding
the Earth.”